Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes - Page 3

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

it's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

There are no inanimate objects.

the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.

One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.

In memory Venice is always magic.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. ... Is this true?